Sims 2 Designer Diaries

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We take a look at the game's aspirations. Plus, new screens.

By Juan Castro

We all want something from life whether its money, fame, popularity, love or a unique combination of all of the above. Personally, the Sims 2 console team wanted to create a great game that fulfilled two parallel ambitions: Firstly, to create a game that remained true to its sister title on PC while offering its players a suite of new content and fresh ideas they've never seen before. Secondly, to deliver a truly unique experience for console players that offered them the deepest life simulator ever shipped for a control pad and the most accessible version of the Sims they've ever seen.

Thankfully, after a long year of hard graft, I think we've managed to pull it off.

In terms of accessibility we've added direct control, meaning you can drive your little Sim around their environment without needing to use the cursor (although that's still there for those who like to queue actions or juggle multiple Sims). In the miniaturized, hyper-detailed world of the Sims this felt like the perfect way to make you identify with your created Sim and feel like you're really living 'in' the world.

The Sims 2 PC game introduced a whole new wants and fears system which rotates around life aspirations. For the console, we wanted to create a new aspiration that really spoke to the console players and the gameplay. After thinking long and hard, we wanted to allow players to focus on their innate creative juices. In addition to the existing fortune, romance, popularity and knowledge aspirations, we came up with the 'Creativity' aspiration which weaves perfectly into two other new features of the game - fashion creation and food creation.

Character creation in the Sims has always been more important than most other games as these are your unique avatars in a story you are creating for yourself. Not only are you often creating multiple characters who need to feel unique and distinct, but you are layering in many factors that affect gameplay such as personality and aspiration. With this in mind, we designed the fashion system to reflect this idea as well. For the first time, you will be able to layer up to three types of clothing on your Sim's upper body and when added to our existing suite of options provides what we hope is the most detailed character system on consoles.

Food creation means your Sim's refrigerators are now more useful than ever. Instead of creating generic meals, you can now choose what exact ingredients to use to create different meals.Each type of refrigerator has different ingredients built into it and you there are now several objects you can buy and place which, when tended correctly, will provide you with unique ingredients to use in your cooking experiments. These ingredients can create five unique effects from nausea to aphrodisiac which can be used to manipulate other Sims.

Add 300+ unique new objects to play with, 16 new locations to explore, 30+ new pre-created Sims to meet, 60+ new social moves and you have what is hopefully a fresh, unusual and addictive game to play this holiday season.